Polls show newspapers and all other traditional media outlets have very little credibilty left with the public.

Frankly, the public is right. And others are right when they say “journalism is dead.”

Most independent media outlets have been bought out by conglomerates over the past several decades.

Now, six media corporations (General Electric, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS) control more than 90 percent of news media outlets in this country.

If you think these companies do not cooperate with the increasingly totalitarian U.S. federal government on which stories get covered and which get “spiked,” you are remaining deliberately naive.

When you read or hear every few months of an “investigative journalist” suddenly dying under mysterious circumstances while working on a story related to so-called ‘national security,” you realize that the few remaining independent media outlets and independent journalists who are left can be “terminated with extreme prejudice” at any moment. Dead reporters write no stories.

You won’t hear much about it except on the Internet, as those same six conglomerates are “on the same page” in not further publicizing, much less investigating, such “tragic accidents.”

We live in a police state. The Fourth Amendment is dead. The First Amendment is critically wounded.

Ironically, the Second Amendment, the one most thought would fall first, is holding up quite well.

However, all those who have armed and continue to arm themselves, for whatever reason, do look a little silly now in objecting to “background checks.”

With the recent revelations confirming what many of us have long suspected about the National Security Agency and its thousands of private contractors conducting continuous surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans without any regard for the Fourth Amendment, it is comical to think “they” don’t already know the background of every gun owner and purchaser in this country.

There’s nothing wrong with being heavily armed, but when you are in a police state, the militarized police are going to want to be EVEN MORE heavily armed than you are. And you can expect their budget requests for whatever new gadgetry they think they need to fight some phantom “militia” out there to be approved without dissent. As always, bend over, taxpayers.

Newspapers do still rank slightly higher in credibility than the U.S. Congress in recent polls. People should probably cut the members of Congress some slack, though. After all, every last one of them also has an FBI file full of things for which they can be blackmailed (all but the few Christlike ones, anyway). And the NSA can listen in on the conversations of these supposed representatives of the people as easily as it can on the rest of us.

Frankly, NO ONE should believe the “just trust us” message President Barack Obama tried to convey when he held a press conference about this topic on June 7. However, it is also true, to paraphrase one of his famous sayings, that he “didn’t built that” police surveillance state under which we now live in this formerly free republic. He merely took what was built by the previous administration and has secretly ramped it up to levels heretofore only fantasized about by writers of novels such as George Orwell, author of the seminal 1984.

What the surveillance overseers have been forced to admit they are doing is still likely only the tip of the iceberg compared to the surveillance they are actually conducting on all of us. The real winners in terms of credibility enhancement in all this are those of us who have been smeared as “conspiracy theorists” since 9/11. It’s actually even worse than a lot of us thought.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney (who appeared to be the man in charge during much of the previous administration) used to speak of the “shadow government.”

We may never know the identities of those who rule over us from the shadows. But, again, only the most naive among us continue to believe the elected office holders of the former republic known as the United States of America are anything other than placeholders and figureheads at this point.